Thursday, October 20, 2016

RE: in case you have time

From:dre@fb.com To: john.podesta@gmail.com Date: 2015-08-04 00:16 Subject: RE: in case you have time

From:dre@fb.com To: john.podesta@gmail.com Date: 2015-08-04 00:16 Subject: RE: in case you have time

Sheryl – thank you for the intro, to bcc for scheduling. Hi John, If 4-5pm Thursday afternoon on our campus in Menlo Park would work for you, that also works great for Mark. Please let me know and I can send the specifics over. My best, Andrea From: Sheryl Sandberg Sent: Monday, August 3, 2015 4:52 PM To: John Podesta <john.podesta@gmail.com> Cc: Andrea Besmehn <dre@fb.com>; Elliot Schrage <elliot@fb.com> Subject: RE: in case you have time We would love to make it work for this trip or another. Andrea here to coordinate with you. From: John Podesta [mailto:john.podesta@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, August 03, 2015 4:33 PM To: Sheryl Sandberg Subject: Re: in case you have time Sheryl, Happy to do. My schedule is a little squeezed on this trip probably my best times are Wednesday evening or late afternoon Thursday, but I'm back often and could get on his schedule in a more reasonable way. Looking forward to seeing you. John On Monday, August 3, 2015, Sheryl Sandberg <sheryl@fb.com<mailto:sheryl@fb.com>> wrote: John, I hope you are well – thinking of all of you often and following every move! I can’t imagine you have any free time at all, but in case you do on this trip to the Bay area or another, wondering if you would be willing to spend some time with Mark Zuckerberg. Mark is meeting with people to learn more about next steps for his philanthropy and social action and it’s hard to imagine someone better placed or more experienced than you to help him. As you may know, he’s young and hungry to learn — always in learning mode — and is early in his career when it comes to his philanthropic efforts. He’s begun to think about whether/how he might want to shape advocacy efforts to support his philanthropic priorities and is particularly interested in meeting people who could help him understand how to move the needle on the specific public policy issues he cares most about. He wants to meet folks who can inform his understanding about effective political operations to advance public policy goals on social oriented objectives (like immigration, education or basic scientific research). In case you have time on any trip, Andrea can schedule. And if it has to wait until after the campaign, we will all understand. Sheryl

Gateway Pundit The mainstream media always use polls to push their agenda. Polls can be skewed by selecting an unreasonable sample size, by asking lead up questions or by selecting more of a sample population of one side of an issue to achieve a desired result. Main stream media skews polls to discourage potential voters from voting and has done it for years.

A good example of the media trying to shape a vote was in 1980. In a Gallup poll released on October 26th in 1980, two weeks before the election, Jimmy Carter was leading Ronald Reagan 47 – 39. Two weeks later Reagan won in such a landslide that Carter conceded before California was closed.

Another example of mainstream liberal media bias was in 1988. A Gallup Poll from July 26 showed Michael S. Dukakis leading George H. W. Bush by 17 points. Of course Bush went on to thump Dukakis in the general election.

This past week a number of polls show Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by various margins. One poll last week reported by NBC/WSJ showed Hillary ahead by 11. However, Truthfeed pointed out that NBC/WSJ didn’t mention that the poll was created by a Hillary Super PAC.

Realclearpolitics.com takes an average of these distorted polls to come up with their analysis of the current race. Their efforts are a great example of the phrase – ‘garbage in – garbage out’.

With all the liberal distortions and dishonesty we decided to have a small team of actuarial and statistics professionals take a look at a couple of the recent polls to get their take on the reliability of these polls. They selected the recent FOX poll from October 14 showing Hillary up by 7 and the WSJ/NBC poll from October 16 showing Hillary with an 11 point lead.

The first observation is that both polls are heavily skewed towards Democrats. At a high level, the FOX poll consists of 43 Dems to 36 Reps to 21 Other while the NBC poll shows 44 Dems to 37 Reps to 19 Other. By selecting more Dems the polls are designed to provide a Dem result.

Our experts next analyzed the data and calculated results using the same data from the two surveys on a split of 40 Dems, 40 Reps and 20 Other. The results show that using either sets of data Trump comes out ahead with a larger margin of victory using the FOX data.

Clearly the polls using data that is heavily weighted towards Democrat voters is incorrectly skewed.

The Democrats on the other hand had 7 million votes less than their record year in 2008 with 30 million this year compared to 37 million in 2008.

Also, the primaries were heavily contested on both sides resulting in factions from each party vowing not to vote for the party candidate. The impact of these two groups is difficult to judge. The percentage of these voters that change parties is probably limited. If anything, the Sanders people will probably be more likely to vote for Trump since he is an outsider and many of them will never vote for Crooked Hillary.

In the presidential race of Truman vs Dewey, it was so certain that Dewey would win that newspapers printed their morning headline in advance. As we all know, Truman won.

Finally, it is difficult to determine what the independent voters will do but many independent voters partook in the primaries to vote for Trump. Therefore it is more likely that Independent voters vote for Trump as well.

If more Democratic voters vote for Trump than Republicans vote for Hillary and more Independents vote for Trump than Hillary, both scenarios which are highly likely, then the results of the general election will likely be a Trump landslide.

he Vatican Submits to Islam (2006-2016)

Pope Benedict spoke honestly about Islam. Now it has come to light that he was being undermined by a shadowy cabal that wanted to install Cardinal Bergoglio — the present Pope Francis — as Pope and “modernize” the Catholic Church. One thing they’ve certainly succeeded in doing is silencing within the Church all resistance to the global jihad that has victimized hundreds of thousands of Christians. The Church leadership is betraying its own people.

If 9/11 was the declaration of jihad against the West, 9/12 will be remembered as one of the most dramatic knee-bends of the Western cultural submission to Islam.

On September 12th 2006, Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) landed in Bavaria, Germany, where he was born and first taught theology. He was expected to deliver alecture in front of the academic community at the University of Regensburg. That lesson would go down to history as the most controversial papal speech of the last half-century.

On this, the 10th anniversary of the speech, the Western world and the Islamic world both owe Benedict an apology, but unfortunately, the opposite happened: the Vatican has apologized to the Muslims.

In his lecture, Pope Benedict clarified the internal contradictions of contemporary Islam, but he also offered a terrain of dialogue with Christianity and Western culture. The Pope spoke of the Jewish, Greek and Christian roots of Europe’s faith, explaining why these are different from Islamic monotheism. His talk contained a quote from the Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman”.

This keg of dynamite was softened by a quotation from a Koranic sura of Mohammed’s youth, Benedict noted, “when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat”, and which says: “There is no compulsion in religion.”

Pope Benedict’s talk was not a surprise. “It is no secret that the Pope worried about Islam”,Christopher Caldwell noted in the Financial Times.

“He has doubted publicly that it can be accommodated in a pluralistic society. He has demoted one of John Paul II’s leading advisers on the Islamic world and tempered his support for a programme of inter-religious dialogue run by Franciscan monks at Assisi. He has embraced the view of Italian moderates and conservatives that the guiding principle of inter-religious dialogue must be reciprocità. That is, he finds it naive to permit the building of a Saudi-funded mosque, Europe’s largest, in Rome, while Muslim countries forbid the construction of churches and missions”.

In Regensburg, Benedict staged the drama of our time and for the first time in the Catholic Church’s history — a Pope talked about Islam without recycling platitudes. In that lecture, the Pope did what in the Islamic world is forbidden: freely discussing faith. He said that God is different from Allah. We never heard that again.

The quotation of Manuel II Palaeologus bounced around the world, shaking the Muslimumma [community], which reacted violently. Even the international press was unanimous in a chorus of condemnation of the “Pope’s aggression on Islam.”

The reaction to Pope’s speech proved that he was right. From Muslim leaders to the New York Times, everybody demanded the Pope’s apologies and submission. The mainstream media turned him into an incendiary proponent of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” In the Palestinian Authority area, Christian churches were burned and Christians targeted. British Islamists called to “kill” the Pope, but Benedict defied them.

At the same time, in Somalia, an Italian nun was shot. In Iraq, a Syrian Orthodox priest was beheaded by al-Qaeda and mutilated after the terrorists demanded that the Catholic Church to apologize for the speech. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood pledged retaliations against the Pope. A Pakistani leader, Shahid Shamsi, accused the Vatican of supporting “the Zionist entity.” Salih Kapusuz, number two in the party of the Turkey’s then Prime Minister (now President) Recep Tayyip Erdogan, compared Pope Benedict XVI to Hitler and Mussolini. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, insisted that the words of the Pope belong to “the chain of US-Israeli conspiracy,” and accused Benedict of being part of the “Crusader conspiracy.”

Security around Pope Benedict was soon massively increased. Two years later, the Pope had been barred from speaking at Rome’s most important university, La Sapienza. After the Regensburg affair, Benedict would not be the same anymore. Islamists and Western appeasers had been able to close his mouth.

A few days after the lecture, exhausted and frightened, Pope Benedict apologized. I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address … which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims,” the Pope told pilgrims at his Castelgandolfo summer residence. The quote did not “in any way express my personal thoughts. I hope this serves to appease hearts.”

The Pope may have said that to stop further violence. But since then, apologies to the Islamic world have become the official Vatican policy.

“The default positions vis-à-vis militant Islam are now unhappily reminiscent of Vatican diplomacy’s default positions vis-à-vis communism during the last 25 years of the Cold War,” wrote George Weigel, a US leading scholar. The Vatican’s new agenda seeks “to reach political accommodations with Islamic states and foreswear forceful public condemnation of Islamist and jihadist ideology.”

Ten years since the Regensburg lecture, relevant as ever after ISIS’s attacks on European soil, another Pope, Francis I, has tried in many ways to separate Muslims and violence and always avoided mentioning that forbidden word: Islam. As Sandro Magister, one of Italy’s most important journalists on Catholic issues, wrote: “In the face of the offensive of radical Islam, Francis’s idea is that ‘we must soothe the conflict’. And forget Regensburg.”

The entire Vatican’s diplomatic body today carefully avoids the words “Islam” and “Muslims,” and instead embraces a denial that a clash of civilization exists. Returning fromWorld Youth Day in Poland last August, Pope Francis denied that Islam itself is violent and claimed that the potential for violence lies within every religion, including Catholicism. Previously, Pope Francis said there is “a world war,” but denied that Islam has any role in it.

In May, Pope Francis explained that the “idea of conquest” is integral to Islam as a religion, but he quickly added that some might interpret Christianity, the religion of turning the other cheek, in the same way. “Authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence,” the Pope claimed in 2013. A year later, Francis declaredthat “Islam is a religion of peace, one which is compatible with respect for human rights and peaceful coexistence.” He claimed that it is the ills of global economy, and not Islam, that inspire terrorism. And a few days ago, the Pope said that “people who call themselves Christians but do not want refugees at their door are hypocrites.”

Pope Francis’s pontificate has been marked by this moral equivalence between Christianity and Islam, which also obfuscates the crimes of Muslims against their own people, Eastern Christians and the West….

Pope Francis is still awaited for a visit at the church of St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray, where Father Jacques Hamel was murdered by Islamists this summer. That killing, ten years after the Regensburg lecture, is the most tragic proof that Benedict was right and Francis wrong.

OCTOBER 20, 2016 8:40 AM BY ROBERT SPENCER

Two fundamentally different visions of America clash on stage for the last time. My latest in FrontPage:

The peculiar self-contradiction of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was on abundant display Wednesday night during her third and last presidential debate with Donald Trump: running as the anointed heir of a two-term president in whose administration she served, she has to maintain both that everything is going great and that the nation in general is in drastic need of repair. Above all, amid all the bluster and platitudes, she and Trump took up opposing sides on virtually all the major fault lines of contemporary America, emphasizing yet again that this election is for all the marbles: either the U.S. will continue on the road to socialist internationalism, or recover a sense of itself. This may be the last time that question is at stake in a presidential election.

“What kind of country are we going to be?,” Hillary Clinton asked near the beginning of the debate, and that indeed was the question. The Supreme Court, she told us, needs to stand on the side of the American people, not on side of the wealthy. What would a Supreme Court that stood on the side of the people, rather than the plutocrats, look like? Why, of course it would be one that said no to Citizen’s United, and yes to Marriage Equality and Roe vs. Wade: as far as Hillary Clinton is concerned, anyone who stands for traditional values is simply not of the people, or any people she has any interest in representing. Nor, presumably, among Hillary Clinton’s people are those who respect and want to uphold the Second Amendment – in which she firmly believes, she assured us Wednesday night, as long as it is gutted of any actual substance.

Trump, on the other hand, affirmed that he would appoint justices who would interpret the Constitution as written, repeal Roe v. Wade and return the abortion question to the states, and protect gun rights. Chicago, he pointed out, has some of the nation’s toughest gun laws, yet also has more gun violence than any other city. This was a telling point; in response, Clinton promised she would give us both the Second Amendment and “reform,” but did not explain how this sleight-of-hand would be performed.

The situation was the same when the topic turned to immigration. Trump spoke of the need for strong borders, pointing to the drugs pouring into the country over the Mexican border as the reason why a border wall was needed, and declaring: “We have no country if we have no border.” In response, Clinton spoke about not wanting to send illegal immigrant parents away from their children who are citizens – an answer that may have tugged at Leftist heartstrings, but left the drug problem unaddressed.

Clinton danced all night. When moderator Chris Wallace quoted her earlier statement saying she wanted open borders, Clinton turned the question into one about Wikileaks, and pressed Trump over whether he would condemn Russia, which she insisted was behind the leaks, for meddling in an American election. “That was a great pivot,” Trump noted drily, “from her wanting open borders.”

Once Clinton had brought up Putin, Trump bored in, charging: “She doesn’t like Putin because Putin has outsmarted her in every way.” In response, Clinton promised to work with our allies all over the world. That highlighted her campaign’s nagging contradiction again, leaving unanswered the question of why the world is so aflame today after eight years of Barack Obama, who came into office with similar promises to mend America’s relationships with friends and foes alike globally – promises that were taken so seriously that he won the Nobel Peace Prize before he had done anything at all. (What’s left to give President Hillary Clinton as she begins her efforts to bring peace to our troubled world? Sainthood?)

There was so much that we had heard before. Clinton promised to make the rich pay their fair share of taxes. Some enterprising and independent-minded historian should research the history of that shopworn phrase, used by so very many Democratic presidential candidates before Hillary. Who was the first to use it? Certainly not Barack Obama, although he made the same promise, or John Kerry or Al Gore, who did as well, or Hillary’s husband. Was it Mike Dukakis? Jimmy Carter? Harry Truman? Woodrow Wilson? Grover Cleveland? How far back does this phrase go, and why, after eight years of Barack Obama, are the poor soaked rich still not paying their fair share? If he couldn’t make them pony up, how will Hillary accomplish it?

That was the rub, on all the issues Trump and Clinton discussed Wednesday evening. She pledged to eradicate the Islamic State, whereupon Trump noted that it was the vacuum created in Iraq by the precipitous Obama/Clinton withdrawal from Iraq that led to the creation of ISIS in the first place. Trump pointed out that the U.S. is pouring money into Syrian rebel groups of doubtful reliability, and noted that if they overthrow Assad (“and he is a bad guy”), Syria might end up with a regime’s worse than Assad, and noted that the chaos in Syria has “caused the great migration, the great Trojan Horse,” with “many ISIS-aligned” coming into the U.S. “Thanks a lot Hillary,” he said acidly, “thanks a lot for doing a great job.”

Indeed. If she didn’t get all this right when she was Secretary of State, how can Americans be confident she will get it right the next time, particularly when all she is offering is more of the same, more of the same failed foreign policies that have gotten the world into the fix it’s in today — with the centerpiece being the denial of the nature, magnitude and motivating ideology of the jihad threat?

That is what is ultimately the choice Americans face: more of the same, or a drastic change of course. If Hillary Clinton is elected president, and the mainstream media is in a frenzy to do all it can to make sure that she is, Americans will at very least know what they’re getting, and a great many of them will applaud it. Ultimately, however, politically correct fantasies will collapse under the weight of reality. If that happens while she is president, there will be more of the same in another way as well: many Americans who applauded her platitudes, generalities, and appeals to sentiment on Wednesday night will be looking for ways to blame the Republicans.

#Illegals seeking asylum up 900%, get cash, welfare, school loans

The number of illegals seeking asylum to gain easy access to the United States has jumped 900 percent in less than 10 years, greatly expanding the Immigration population receiving Social Security benefits, school loans, green cards, welfare and other taxpayer funded services, according to figures from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

While about 8,000 mostly Latin Americans in 2009 sought asylum, the number is expected to reach 80,000 or more this year, according to a projection from the Center for Immigration Studies.

The report said 80 percent come from just three countries that have already flooded the border with youths and young families, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Most claim a fear of torture, abuse, or retaliation, fulfilling the U.S. requirement that they must voice some credible fear of returning home.

Stay abreast of the latest developments from nation's capital and beyond with curated News Alerts from the Washington Examiner news desk and delivered to your inbox.

The surge was sparked by a freeing up by President Obama of the restrictions to those requesting asylum. Now they are let into the United States while they pursue their asylum request.

The author of the report, Jessica M. Vaughan, the Center's director of policy studies, said many of those arriving at the border to claim asylum are trafficked through Mexico by gangs charging fees to get their clients into the U.S.

What's more, typically many are granted a temporary OK, then find their way to U.S. cities. A House panel found that some 90 percent are granted asylum, though only 30 percent of the requests were "fraud free," said the CIS analysis.